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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28389813">X</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed'>wreathed</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Terror (TV 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anal Sex, Anonymous Sex, Colonialism, Crossdressing, Dildos, F/M, M/M, Pegging, Pre-Canon, Prostitution, Vignettes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 14:48:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,033</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28389813</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years, four cities; James discovers pleasure and how best to seek it.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Commander James Fitzjames/Other(s), Sophia Cracroft/Commander James Fitzjames</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>52</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>X</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <i>Valletta, 1833</i>
</p>
<p>James has long imagined himself dying somewhere under a surfeit of blazing sunlight. To leave the earth tucked up under blankets at seventy would mean he would be remembered as a frail and elderly man; instead, he sees himself pulled under by the wide heat of the Sargasso after completing some heroic and well-documented feat of bravery in battle. He dreams the liquid heat of it with the confidence of a clairvoyant.</p>
<p>He wakes, and he is alive, so alive, and remembers that today is the day he will go ashore again in Malta.</p>
<p>Every light casts shadows, and with gregariousness James deflects away from the unilluminated parts of his past and present. The seedier parts of the city are best left in their own discreet darkness; on the surface James always makes sure to appear carefree, and of the other men he is not overtly moralistically judgemental, but for himself he carefully metered out his visits. If he were to cause embarrassment to his family, they would think him like his foolish progenitor, unable to control his urges. Women with whom you exchanged coin were better skilled than others at avoiding issue, and as much as possible he made practice of acts that could not result in pregnancy. His current position in the Navy was not stable enough for him to act as though he had a well-connected network to catch him if he stumbled.</p>
<p>The very first time he had sought company, he had been uneasy about the smell of the room, even though he has lived on ships and killed men. It had been over with very quickly. He could feel the shape of her amusement underneath her gossamer veneer of encouragement. The experience had not gifted him a happy memory to look back on.</p>
<p>This evening, he attends the opera at the <i>Teatru Manoel</i>, and seeing the painted screens and fine gowns grants him a powerful, dizzying want for something of that glamour, and so after the fall of the final curtain he burrows away into a narrower, denser network of streets to seek to sate the need this brush with high civilisation has given him.</p>
<p>On his visit — another room that would seem small to anyone other than a sailor newly ashore — he spies a curious device that has been left visible nestled in a half-closed drawer, and he had only meant to ask what it was for, but the woman is motioning to him <i>is this what you want</i> and James finds himself, only part-cognisant, nodding his assent. Then soon he is on his hands and knees, biting his own fist, the woman’s pelvis and the leather straps of the contraption an incongruous feeling against his behind as he is smoothly, firmly fucked with the cool, rigid, slicked-up length of it. The skirts raised to his waist he’d had to imagine, but in his mind his spread-apart legs are entirely bare.</p>
<p>He had known what he was after that.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <i>Singapore, 1841</i>
</p>
<p>Over time, after the hardships of Mesopotamia and his successful rise to gunnery lieutenant, James finds his self-set confines on activities ashore have lessened.</p>
<p>Other men have a particular tobacco pipe or boat knife with them always on their travels, and this is perhaps not so different, even if it might be at his mouth only on occasion. Carved all from ivory, laid out beside one of jade, and the proprietor is shrewd enough to see James’s eyes linger.</p>
<p>He pays a pretty penny for it, but when he is on full pay and away from home it feels as if he will never run out of money again. The stringent self-awareness he has without an assignment to distract him lingers only in a faded form: of his natural father’s shameful debts and the potential for a hereditary spendthrift propensity that he must avoid.</p>
<p>The further they are away from London, the easier it is to feel he is capable of anything. He wonders whether the man who sired him had felt the same way.</p>
<p>His new purchase is cool to the touch, but responsive to the sweltering heat of his skin. James has it placed in a camphorwood box also on sale — eye-catchingly ornate, carved with beautiful interlocking patterns and covered in marquetry — before placing the box in the canvas bag he is carrying. Within this establishment, he lingers. George Barrow is a room upstairs, racking up debts he will not be able to repay. Later there will be time to make use of what he carries.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <i>Nanking, 1842</i>
</p>
<p>James watches the hazy silhouettes of women, beautiful and marred in turn, floating in and out of his field of vision through the dizzying amount of opium smoke curling upwards to the low ceiling. He wants none of them, save one. She is taller than the others and moves with purpose. She wears silk and has a painted face.</p>
<p>Only when they are in a partitioned-off section after the ugliness of monetary negotiation has taken place does he see the masculine outline of her through her split-apart silk robe. No woman was he, or perhaps he was something else quite mysterious altogether.</p>
<p>He calls James strong and big — James doesn’t know the words, but dexterous hands make his meanings clear — but James doesn’t want to be. He doesn’t want.</p>
<p>Their prick is only half hard. James feels an acute and sickly pang of fear in the opiate haze of the risks he is opening himself to. James lies on his back against the open silk robe that has been set down there for him, soft and cool.</p>
<p>“Use this,” he says, handing his companion the carved ivory phallus he is rarely without. He does not know how much English is understood, but he knows he is capable of being commanding beyond parsable semantics. “Drive it into me until I can think no longer.” It is plain that saying so is superfluous.</p>
<p><i>Can I buy this?</i> he motions afterwards. He lets the silk run through his fingers as he holds up what he’s been lying on, oil stains and all, alongside further coin. The centre of him aches, and he feels unsteady on his own feet. “Can I buy this?” he asks in English. His meaning is taken one way or another and his request is granted with an as-you-please shrug. You can buy anything if you are brave enough to ask.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <i>London, 1844</i>
</p>
<p>“Rumour is that I am clasping hands with the most exemplary gentleman to have on one’s dance card, Commander,” Sir John Franklin’s niece tells him, looking up at James suspiciously angelically as she transitions into a moderately adept plié. “An <i>excellent</i> dancer; charming, handsome and chivalrous.”</p>
<p>“You flatter me,” James says, for he likes to make a statement from time to time on something that is already plain.</p>
<p>“So chivalrous that no lady I have spoken to has anything to report of a visiting card left to express some further interest, never mind anything of impropriety.” Her eyes are caring, yet sharp and gleeful, as though she is piercing his side with a well-aimed shiv designed to bring him out of misery. No-one notices their closeness as they dance. “Almost as if there is no actual interest at all.”</p>
<p>“I am too often away at sea to be able to bear to disappoint, Miss Cracroft, for I would so soon be gone again.”</p>
<p>“That doesn’t stop most sailors,” Sophia says. “They would make some overture then leave conveniently on a fresh voyage.”</p>
<p>The following week, he comes to her for tea — unchaperoned, yet nothing indecorous happens — and he wonders what he is supposed to be leading them to. It feels like what they strike up is more like a friendship with one of his more boisterous chums, but she is interested in his naval adventures in a way that surely must be interested flattery. Yet her travels have been extensive too; they are able to learn from each other.</p>
<p>Over time, he sees some gentle, teasing flirtation from her, more forthright and less transactional than he is used to receiving, and James feels he has made a friend who on some level understands him. She has suggested that James is not her only regular clandestine visitor, and he knows she holds Francis Crozier in some sort of esteem (although not half as high as what Francis holds for her).</p>
<p>One evening, they have wine together and James gathers the courage to take out the ornate box from Singapore and trot towards Sophia to proffer it shame-faced, like a dog with a stolen bone between his teeth.</p>
<p>“Oh, goodness,” she says after opening it, looking — James realises belatedly, because he had not been expecting it — not intimidated or appalled but rather the height of relieved. “I thought you were going to do something quite mad like present me with a betrothal ring.”</p>
<p>“Certainly not,” he says. He hesitates before his next words, his lack of desire for such an arrangement superseded by the need for reassurance that all would enjoy his company for as much as they can get of it. “Would that be so terrible?”</p>
<p>“We are not the marrying types,” Sophia tells him, not unkindly. James thought it very brave for a woman to admit as much to anyone. What if she ever had need for money?</p>
<p>“So?” James asks, teeth at the inside of his own cheek, eyes wide.</p>
<p>“It’s…” she stammers. She begins to blush, but only slightly. “Well, it’s a very generous gift, but—”</p>
<p>“For me,” James says around a swallow. “Is what I meant. That is, if you were willing.” He looks to her and waits, already more words exchanged between them on the matter than he has ever had to make before; typically, money removes the requirement. But after a painful wait, Sophia nods, lips pressed together, wordless.</p>
<p>“I fear I don’t quite know what I’m doing,” she says later still, at the beginnings of the acute push of it into him. Never, <i>never</i> is it as good when he does it to himself alone, when he has the uncommon combination of adequate privacy and time. “So you are going to take it roughly, I suggest. And you are going to like it.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <i>F— Street, 1845</i>
</p>
<p>George Barrow has told James about this place — that alliance still useful in a handful of ways, even beyond the commendation James has obtained from George’s father that he be recommended for Sir John’s grand expedition. </p>
<p>The quirk, or, less kindly, fad of this particular establishment is a meeting environment that allows total anonymity: downstairs has walls constructed with holes for pricks to be sucked through by unseen mouths, present for the sheer act of it. Upstairs, there are rooms where one can arrange the entirety of themselves half unseen, half entirely vulnerable, like a boxed-off pillory for the torso, and make oneself available to whoever arrived willing.</p>
<p>His form concealed in a gargantuan woollen cloak designed for foul weather, James makes his way upstairs and finds a room.</p>
<p>He leaves the pretty box and its contents between a bottle of oil left out and the spot where one of his spread apart knees will rest, in case his visitor might like to tease him with it first, but, he thinks with a sharp thrill that warms him, they probably would not wish to, they would probably drive right into him exactly as he had presented himself, depersonalised and convenient. </p>
<p>On the hidden side of the partition, he nervously hurries himself ready. He has a shift and then only two petticoats to be covered by the skirt of the dress — a bright blue, constructed out of a lighter material intended for summer. He leaves his undershirt on for warmth and, as his frame is too broad for the bodice, the back of the dress remains unfastened and without its proper underthings. He must look ridiculous, but as the top half of him will not be seen no-one will ever know. Leaving himself barefoot, the skirts hang well enough and leave him appropriately accessible.</p>
<p>On knees and forearms, head and torso in the lonely darkness of the hidden half of the partition, he waits. This is the one visit he is permitting himself before preparations for the expedition become too intense to leave him with an excess of free time, and then they will leave for Greenhithe. He has appointed his lieutenants and met <i>Terror</i>’s captain, who James had wanted to ask more about magnetics and his previous expedition to the Antarctic, but Francis Crozier had taken a curiously instantaneous dislike to him. There had been a rather pointed question about the list of recruits James has put together. Was there some possibility Francis had found out something about Sophia? But never mind that; James usually manages to win most men over in time.</p>
<p>There is a knock on the door, approaching genteel. There is no-one specific James holds in his mind, only the knowledge that whoever enters will be a human being with desires of their very own.</p>
<p>The door closes, then there are footsteps across the floorboards. Heavy, practical boots that did not match the polite rap of the door: with an excited clench of his stomach, James imagines the out-of-focus shape of a burly sort of working fellow.</p>
<p>“Very pretty,” the man says thoughtfully. An Ulsterman, gruff and deep, but not as slurred as when James had dinner with…</p>
<p>Surely this man isn’t who James is now thinking of. His pursuit of Miss Cracroft is well known. As was, at least in Navy circles, their unchristian relations.</p>
<p>The man comes closer, placing a strong hand around James’s ankle. “I’ll have you, unwise as it may be,” he says.</p>
<p>It <i>is</i> him. Francis Crozier. Of all the people, of all the men it could have possibly been.</p>
<p>James has hung there no more than half hard, feeling somewhat foolish presenting himself like this and waiting, wanton a man as he is, but when he knows for certain it is Francis’s weatherworn hand and Francis’s voice he feels the quick dizzying bloodrush of his prick filling out under his skirts. He knows Francis thinks so little of him; the idea that Francis is here in this place also, that Francis, without knowing that he has his hand on James in this moment, is soon going to—</p>
<p>He should speak up, ask Francis to leave. His mouth stays closed. Francis lifts his dress, petticoats and shift up in one go, James’s bareness exposed, and James presses his lips together to stop himself from crying out.</p>
<p>“Very pretty cunny you've got, miss,” Francis says, his slightly mocking lilt undercut by a new breathiness to his voice that reveals his interest. And then his thumb drags straight into James without warning, slick from the oil bottle. James's thighs shake. </p>
<p>"Has someone already eased the way for me this evening? Have they left you like this? How cruel," Francis says, sounding to James as if he is far away, and from the all-too-brief squeeze James’s prick gets Francis must be referring to James's leaking cockstand. James can't touch himself like this, and it’s driving him to madness. He thrusts himself into Francis's loose fist from the ache and the humiliation of it, and he can’t help but moan. </p>
<p>“And you haven’t had enough? They weren’t enough. Perhaps I alone am not enough either, not for someone so eager. I would not want to leave such a benevolent soul unsatisfied.”</p>
<p>James shifts again, making his need even more clear, and Francis’s prick is soon inside him, hot and thick and overwhelming. Flesh and blood.</p>
<p>Francis swears under his breath, crudely pressing in and out of tightness without so much as a hand to James’s prick, which gets left to empty air. James, still trembling, listens to the sounds Francis makes and the tight grip of Francis’s hand on his waist.</p>
<p>He hears the clink of glass that must be Francis picking the oil back up, and then there is a pause as Francis spots the box for the first time. His prick is withdrawn. James finds himself, even as he is left to leak untouched in desperate want, holding his breath as the box is opened.</p>
<p>“Ah, I am no stranger to this. I know a woman who owns something remarkably similar.” James smiles unseen at the thought of Sophia making clandestine arrangements to make such an improper purchase of her own. “Let’s see if you can manage a little more, hm?”</p>
<p><i>Please</i>, James wants to cry out, but instead he steadies himself into to a plaintive and wordless groan. Francis laughs, the insufferable man, but that stops when Francis has himself sunken back inside to the hilt. He clenches his hand around James’s prick at last, and James’s toes clench, willing himself to last just a few moments longer.</p>
<p>James cries out again as he feels the smooth tip of the ivory at his rim, not instead of but <i>in addition to</i> Francis pushed deep inside of him, and Francis is swearing again, and frigging James’s prick, and the stretch of both lengths is overwhelming; Francis, the full impressive heat of him, comes buried deep in this impossible tightness, and James kicks against the air as he gasps and expels his release all over Francis’s hand, sweat prickling at his neck from the shame.</p>
<p>There is a withdrawal (a sickly tight squelch accompanying it), an uncomfortable clearing of Francis’s throat and the sounds of clothing being straightened. James hears the door to the room shut. A moment longer he stays like this — on his knees, Francis's seed dripping down his thigh — before he rights himself and shuffles to a standing position. His eyes feel damp from more than sweat, he realises. Had Francis truly nothing further to say? How will he look Francis in the eye after what has transpired? How could he ever forget it?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It’s years until Francis, newly sober and clear-minded, has his eyes fall on the distinct marquetry on top of a stack of books in James’s great cabin that are earmarked to be abandoned aboard, and comprehends.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I'm not the person to write this, but of course they work things out and later on James Clark Ross chinooks in with a satellite phone and some Vit C gummies. Promise.</p>
<p>Title from the real Fitzjames’s super-secret sexytimes marker in his diary, as expounded by Battersby.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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